Levo league, a new wave of women, takes on on the challenge of equal pay.

On April 17th, President Obama proclaimed — National Equal Pay Day, calling Americans to recognize the full value of women’s skills, their contribution to the work force, acknowledge the injustice of wage discrimination, and join efforts to achieve equal pay.

Make some noise generation Y ladies! National Equal Pay Day has defiantly broken the glass ceiling, right? Well, not exactly.

Sad to say, not all companies have taken recognition to the ‘end of inequality.’ Levo League aims to change that.

Led by “Chief Inpir/Instig-ation Officer,” Amanda Pouchot, Levo League offers a unique support system for women of all stages in their career. Composed as a social network, the league helps format and lead women into their careers, allowing them to break through the glass ceiling via personal and professional support.

Women power the economy and sustain our middle class. According to a White House Press Release “For millions of families across our country, women’s wages mean food on the table, decent medical care, and timely mortgage payments. Yet, in 2010 — 47 years after President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963 — women who worked full-time earned only 77 percent of what their male counterparts did … National Equal Pay Day represents the date in the current year through which women must work to match what men earned in the previous year, reminding us that we must keep striving for an America where everyone gets an equal day’s pay for an equal day’s work.”

Just recently the Levo Leauge has initiated the hashtags #ASK4MORE, and #EQUALPAY. The goal is for women to earn more in salary within the next 20 years. For example, in order to earn $150K* in the next 20 years you’ll need to ask for a raise of 8.38% each year, which is a raise of only $1.26 more an hour. (*Based on a 40-hour work week and 50 weeks worked a year.)

Levo League has lots of support and it’s not just from the White House. Other supporters who are backing up this startup include Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.

The Levo Leauge is more than empowering –it’s a home base for progressive women. LOVE IT!

In much the same way that a seed all-inclusively contains the DNA of a tree (its branches, leaves and fruit), each of our intentions contain a ‘fruit,’ or end result as well.

Alternatively, no matter how sophisticated the DNA of a seed, if the environment that seed is planted in does not have a healthy ‘soil,’ there is no way for the seed to bear healthy fruit.

Intention is equally as important as environment.

Likening the above to business: no matter how great our intentions are, or how talented we are, if our environment is not conducive to our growth and the manifestation of our greatness, the end result could never match our intentions.

Speaking for myself personally, I have worked in businesses that lacked either side of the coin. In banking for example, the environment was ripe for growth and profitability, but I didn’t have an intention. While I was learning an incredible amount about capital markets and business, I wasn’t lit up by the industry and I felt as though I was drifting somewhat aimlessly at sea. Later in my career, when I developed clear intentions about my desire to be an entrepreneur; I realized the importance of having an environment that supports the manifestation of my skillset and entrepreneurial desires. A good example: if you want to be a billionaire, make sure you align yourself in a business and/or with partners who share that same desire. If you align with people who desire to earn a few hundred thousand, you will feel a constant frustration because of the stagnation. It’s all about authenticity.

Wisdom is the ability to see the end at the beginning. What seeds are you planting today?

1. Ask yourself everyday what your intentions are (ex: why am I doing what I am doing?). Each of us has desires, however, without our setting an intention, there’s no way to manifest the fulfillment of those desires.

2. Once you have a clear intention, make sure the people you’ve surrounded yourself with can support your growth.

It seems that despite the clear inequality that still exists between males and females in the workplace, very little has been done by companies which has been effective in remedying this issue.

According to Dr. Ronald Burke, (a professor of organizational behaviors); “Gender stereotypes and a lack of mentors contribute to…an environment where employees, when they think of a manager, picture a man.” Because gender differences are so deeply rooted, this statement holds true for women asked to picture a manager as well. These perceived notions have fostered a work environment with a shocking dearth of women in CEO positions.

Even worse than the lack of female CEO’s, is the gender gap between men and women present in the tech sector in particular. Because technology is seen as a male-bent field, women are discouraged and self-discouraged early on from pursuing mathematics and the sciences in school.

I’m going to stress a few quotes in the Bloomberg post which were really eye opening for me personally:

Cisco Systems (@CiscoSystems) executive Kathy Hill says that “The lack of women in technology will hinder U.S. companies’ global competitiveness, leaving a valuable source of female workers untapped.” In these more difficult economic times, it is vital that we turn to utilizing the resources we have and striving for efficiency.

If we neglect the greatness female workers have to offer; the US will sacrifice productivity and maximization. “A homogeneous team is not going to be as innovative and is not going to produce the same level of well-thought-out results as a diverse team,” says Marilyn Nagel, chief executive officer of Watermark (@wtrmrk).

Marilyn is making the case for equality in the workplace from an economic perspective which is too often ignored. By keeping CEO a male dominated position, we will suffer from a lack of diversity which is the key to being able to gain from alternate and varied perspectives.

Leah Eichler (@MommyEconomics), not only has the hippest Twitter handle I’ve seen in a while (I LOVE MommyEconomics), but also writes for the Canadian; The Globe and Mail. In her recent post “Breaking Your Own Glass Ceiling”, Eichler makes it effulgent through the title alone, that it is in our hands (in the hands of female executives), to push forward. Only when we recognize the ability we have to promote change and believe in the ways to get to an equal future, will we realize this potential.

“We need to unlock a vital source of growth that can power our economy in the decades to come, and that vital source of growth is women.” -Hillary Clinton (@HillaryNews)

It’s clear that wireless will be the communication and computing technology of the future, as sales of smartphones and tablets/iPads surge. Competition among mobile carriers, then, is clearly important to both consumers and the economy. The Obama administration has championed a speedy rollout of faster wireless service as a key foundation for innovation and future growth. AT&T had argued that adding T-Mobile would give it the extra network capability it needed to fairly quickly roll out the next generation of high-speed service — 4G — across the nation. But the administration’s antitrust regulators believe there are other ways for AT&T to accomplish that without taking out a competitor (ex: the company could just invest the $39 billion purchase price into expanding its own network.)

A key consideration for the halt was the potential for bigger wireless bills for consumers if T-Mobile was acquired by AT&T. T-Mobile offers voice and data plans that, in some markets, are cheaper than AT&T by 20% or more. Pricing is the most easily measured consumer benefit of competition, and in merger cases, the government typically regards price increases of 5 percent to 10 percent or more as significant. I’m not sure I’m buying what the DOJ is selling, but this parody drives the point home and it’s pretty funny. Happy Friday!

What matters for small business (SMB’s)? Where should you focus? Tim Ferris, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, recently did an article on his blog, titled: “Why Grow? and Other Wisdom from 37Signals”. Ferris writes about the excessive materiality of the workplace, stating that “too many people obsess over tools…fancy office space, lavish furniture, and other frivolities.” Not only is the acquisition of all of these things time consuming, which bars you from maximizing your individual productivity; they are costly in two different ways:

1. the actual money spent on trivialities; and

2. the opportunity cost, or “the cost of any activity measured in terms of the best alternative forgone” of your purchases and choices.

Consider what you would or could have spent the money on instead and you’ll quickly realize that that’s where it should have been spent.

Another valuable tidbit from the post is the statistic, that more than “3,000,000 people worldwide use 37Signals products”, while the company has “fewer than 20 total” employees! This is extremely remarkable because of the sheer numbers, but it taught me a lesson in itself:

“Size doesn’t matter!”

Typically, we are impressed by a company because of its well-known name, or the massive number of employees it has, but in truth these things are not important. We must keep in sight, the key factors and end goals of any business which are efficiency, productivity and profitability–goals that can be innately easier to attain for a small business than for a large one, because of the lean and more precise nature of an SMB operation. Buddha once said, “The mind is everything. What we think, we become” and Ferris echoes “Small is a great destination in itself.” Two fundamentally separated men, both say the same thing: the key to accomplishment is adjusting your personal viewpoint to accommodate the reality that this goal is in fact attainable and within your power to reach and realize.

Jesse Braunstein is a Junior at NYU double majoring in Economics and Psychology. Jesse joined Madison Technology and SheBytes.com in May 2011 as a summer intern. Jesse has been instrumental in utilizing his expanding background to come up with creative perspectives on the Marketing, Advertising and Business Development initiatives at both Madison Technology and SheBytes.com. Jesse’s outlook stems from an Economics and Psychology education and a deep understanding of the individual and how the individual acts within and interacts with the market. Follow Jesse on Twitter and Facebook.

This morning I read through a special McKinsey & Company report, by Joanna Barsh and Lareina Yee titled: “Unlocking the full potential of women in the U.S. economy” . Although the report, 5 full pages, was a little lengthy for my taste, it presented numerous fascinating observations made after much thorough research and contemplation. In short, the report posits that a surefire way to increase GDP, employment, productivity and overall U.S. economic activity is to focus corporate efforts on making certain that women achieve the same roles as men in the workplace.

A particularly inspiring tidbit from the report is that “Between 1970 and 2009, women went from holding 37% of all jobs to nearly 48%”, while “the number of women CEOs in Fortune 500 companies appears stuck at 2-3%.” These two outstanding and shocking statistics respectively depict the rapidly rising number of women in the workplace but signal the stagnation and failure these women have had in making it into top roles at the largest firms.

Denzel Washington, who besides being a superb and even frightening actor, especially in movies like Man on Fire, (by far my favorite Denzel movie; so awesome I recommend those of you who haven’t seen it stop reading and Netflix it right now), and Crimson Tide , is also a fantastic orator. He recently gave the University of Pennsylvania Commencement Address on Monday, May 16, 2011 and said something truly inspiring to the graduates. “Every failed experiment is one step closer to success,” he said, and this is something I sincerely believe. Only when we try do we fail, and only when we fail, are we really trying. The only way for women to take confident steps into the upper echelons of the corporate world, is for other women to fail trying to make it there first.

Even though I value the report’s straightforwardness and its direct title, if I had published it I would have titled the report: “The Key to Unlocking the Full Potential of the U.S. Economy; Unlocking the Full Potential of U.S. Women”. The intention of my title is not to demand a drastic reworking of the subject matter of the report, which I thought was expertly executed, but rather to invoke the report’s readers to rework their own views, thoughts and approaches to the issue. Women, who feel the same way about this imbalance in corporate America, must strive, fail and eventually bloom into their full potentials by daring to be different.

Jesse Braunstein is a Junior at NYU double majoring in Economics and Psychology. Jesse joined Madison Technology and SheBytes.com in May 2011 as a summer intern. Jesse has been instrumental in utilizing his expanding background to come up with creative perspectives on the Marketing, Advertising and Business Development initiatives at both Madison Technology and SheBytes.com. Jesse’s outlook stems from an Economics and Psychology education and a deep understanding of the individual and how the individual acts within and interacts with the market. Follow Jesse on Twitter and Facebook.